Stress matrices and global rigidity of frameworks on surfaces

In 2005, Bob Connelly showed that a generic framework in \bR^d is globally rigid if it has a stress matrix of maximum possible rank, and that this sufficient condition for generic global rigidity is preserved by the 1-extension operation. His results gave a key step in the characterisation of generic global rigidity in the plane. We extend these results to frameworks on surfaces in \bR^3. For a framework on a family of concentric cylinders, cones or ellipsoids, we show that there is a natural surface stress matrix arising from assigning edge and vertex weights to the framework, in equilibrium at each vertex. In the case of cylinders and ellipsoids, we show that having a maximum rank stress matrix is sufficient to guarantee generic global rigidity on the surface. We then show that this sufficient condition for generic global rigidity is preserved under 1-extension and use this to make progress on the problem of characterising generic global rigidity on the cylinder.Comment: Significant changes due to an error in the proof of Theorem 5.1 in the previous version which we have only been able to resolve for 'generic' surface

A necessary condition for generic rigidity of bar-and-joint frameworks in dd-space

A graph $G=(V,E)$ is $d$-sparse if each subset $X\subseteq V$ with $|X|\geq d$ induces at most $d|X|-{{d+1}\choose{2}}$ edges in $G$. Maxwell showed in 1864 that a necessary condition for a generic bar-and-joint framework with at least $d+1$ vertices to be rigid in ${\mathbb R}^d$ is that $G$ should have a $d$-sparse subgraph with $d|X|-{{d+1}\choose{2}}$ edges. This necessary condition is also sufficient when $d=1,2$ but not when $d\geq 3$. Cheng and Sitharam strengthened Maxwell's condition by showing that every maximal $d$-sparse subgraph of $G$ should have $d|X|-{{d+1}\choose{2}}$ edges when $d=3$. We extend their result to all $d\leq 11$.Comment: There was an error in the proof of Theorem 3.3(b) in version 1 of this paper. A weaker statement was proved in version 2 and then used to derive the main result Theorem 4.1 when $d\leq 5$. The proof technique was subsequently refined in collaboration with Hakan Guler to extend this result to all $d\leq 11$ in Theorem 3.3 of version

Radically solvable graphs

A 2-dimensional framework is a straight line realisation of a graph in the Euclidean plane. It is radically solvable if the set of vertex coordinates is contained in a radical extension of the field of rationals extended by the squared edge lengths. We show that the radical solvability of a generic framework depends only on its underlying graph and characterise which planar graphs give rise to radically solvable generic frameworks. We conjecture that our characterisation extends to all graphs

Necessary Conditions for the Generic Global Rigidity of Frameworks on Surfaces

A result due in its various parts to Hendrickson, Connelly, and Jackson and Jord\'an, provides a purely combinatorial characterisation of global rigidity for generic bar-joint frameworks in $\mathbb{R}^2$. The analogous conditions are known to be insufficient to characterise generic global rigidity in higher dimensions. Recently Laman-type characterisations of rigidity have been obtained for generic frameworks in $\mathbb{R}^3$ when the vertices are constrained to lie on various surfaces, such as the cylinder and the cone. In this paper we obtain analogues of Hendrickson's necessary conditions for the global rigidity of generic frameworks on the cylinder, cone and ellipsoid.Comment: 13 page